From the Red Status of Malnutrition to Green Status: A Grandmother's Fight to Save MALI from Malnutrition

What would you do if you were entrusted with an 18-month-old baby, emaciated and abandoned, and you didn't even have enough to feed them? 

That's the question Esther had to answer overnight. Her answer: give everything, week after week, to save her granddaughter.

MALI, two years old, was abandoned by her parents. Her father fled the violence and took refuge in Uganda. Her mother remarried and left her behind, at just a year and a half old. So, it was Esther, her grandmother, who stepped in.

"I am MALI's grandmother. Her mother abandoned her after she was a year and a half old," she explains simply. "I took care of her as best I could."

But means are limited in Katwiguru, in the Binza health zone of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Esther grew soybeans to feed her granddaughter. Last season, she wasn't able to. The repeated displacements due to insecurity prevented her from working the land. Without that harvest, MALI began to waste away. Her little body grew weaker, and Esther watched life slip away from her day by day.

She didn't give up. Every week, braving uncertain roads, she brings MALI to the Katwiguru health centre. 

"When we heard that children were being examined at the health centre, we brought her," she recounts. 

It was MALI's aunt who took her there. After the examinations, the health workers diagnosed severe malnutrition. MALI then received therapeutic foods, those life-saving nutritious sachets.

Thanks to this care, MALI's condition improved. 

"Today her health has improved," Esther notes with relief. "She has regained her appetite. Even when she gets sick, she still manages to have an appetite." 

At the health centre, Esther also learned how to properly prepare porridge. "I learned how to mix the porridge for her recovery," she says. "We were taught to diversify the foods in her meals."

Today, MALI is doing well. She plays with her friends in the neighbourhood. The red circle that marked her malnutrition has turned to yellow, a sign of improvement. Esther hopes it will soon turn green, the colour of full recovery.

For her, this recovery is a deliverance. 

"I thank World Vision for bringing these therapeutic foods," she says, her voice heavy with emotion. "They saved my little girl. May God bless you."

Since 2020, World Vision and its partners have treated more than 7,100 children suffering from malnutrition in this region, including in the most isolated and hard-to-reach health centres. Despite security constraints, the organisation continues its work. Because every child deserves to survive and grow.

MALI's name is MALI, but she could just as well be Joseph, or Deborah, or any other child in Katwiguru. Behind this single case lie thousands of similar stories. Families struggling, grandmothers carrying their grandchildren on their backs to the health centre, health workers operating under precarious conditions, because every life counts.